never more seen in this world.’ That’s the kind of missing person problem I like.”
“That is more intriguing than Hoffa, I agree,” said Lynn. She stopped working on the cadaver in front of her and listened to Jin.
Diane paused, too, sitting back on the stool. She had a large portion of the skull pieced together. The back, the side, the frontal down to the brow ridge, and one cheek. With the right x-ray she could probably identify the body. But it was a long shot that there would be the right x-ray.
The partial skull sat in a small tub of sand looking as if it had just been revealed by a sandstorm. The sand held the blackened pieces of bone together while the glue dried. Jonas Briggs, the archaeologist at her museum, said that in his profession they reconstruct clay pots the same way. “Makes nice little Zen gardens—thousand-year-old potsherds standing in clean bronze sand,” he’d said. This Zen garden looked macabre.
There was still an array of pieces to put together. She looked at them, mentally identifying the part of the skull each piece was from. Hard to believe that only yesterday this person was alive—just yesterday.
“They had a special on Court TV two nights ago about missing persons—double feature, two hours’ worth,” said Jin. “Great stuff. Turns out there are several missing persons who meet my criteria of interesting. A teenage girl and her family were leaving church when she went back in for her purse and was never seen again. Doesn’t that sound like Sherlock Holmes? And a whole family just fell off the face of the earth. No one knew they were gone; they just weren’t home anymore—but all their belongings were still in the house, their car in the driveway. And then there was the man who was last seen in the waiting room of his doctor’s office. The receptionist didn’t see him leave and no one knows what happened to him. All these people were normal people with no secret lives or anything—that anyone found out about,” he added. “I’d like to investigate them.”
“No clues at all in any of the cases?” asked Lynn.
Diane picked up a piece of nasal bone and turned it over in her hand. Even blackened as it was, a healed crack was evident. Something distinctive about this individual, she thought as she looked for surrounding pieces.
“No clues,” said Jin. “But I tell you, my favorite is Colonel Percy Fawcett.”
“Never heard of him,” said Lynn.
“He’s the coolest missing person. He disappeared with his son and his son’s friend in the Amazon while looking for an ancient city inhabited by a mysterious tribe. His story is really strange, full of subterranean cities, alien tribes, psychics, with the lost city of Atlantis thrown in. Great stuff,” he repeated.
“Do you ever try to solve any of the cases?” asked Diane. Jin turned to her, looking almost startled that she had been listening.
“I’ve helped with a couple of cold cases that detective friends of mine were working on. I’m afraid I didn’t offer much in the way of a solution. Mostly I just read up on them and try to solve them—you know, like an armchair detective. I’ve gotten a few good hypotheses. You know, there’s been quite a few missing persons north of here in the Smoky Mountains. People disappear and nothing is ever found of them,” he said. “Nothing. I mean, like what’s in the Smokys?”
“Wild pigs,” said Diane without looking up from the piece of skull she was gluing together. “They eat everything with blood on it—bones, sticks, you name it.”
“Yes, pigs,” agreed Lynn. “Once you’re dead, the wild boars scarf you up.”
Jin looked from Diane to Lynn. “Well, thanks for ruining a perfectly good mystery for me.”
Lynn and Diane both laughed.
Diane had finished gluing all the pieces of the skull she had and they sat drying in the sandbox. It looked like the pieced-together ancient skulls that she had in the museum—but this person was recently alive.
“I’m going to take a break,” she said. “When I come back, I’ll see if we have any x-rays of faces with broken noses. I believe I can ID this skull.”
“I think I’ll finish up this cadaver,” said Lynn. She sneaked a peek at the table where Brewster Pilgrim left his.
Jin slipped off his gloves and put on a new pair, walked over to Pilgrim’s table, and began preparations to cut the femur and take a DNA sample. Back to business.